Benchmarking 5 Popular Load Balancers: Nginx, HAProxy, Envoy, Traefik, and ALB

By Gerred Dillon | December 10, 2018

When choosing a load balancer to front your application’s traffic, there are several factors to consider. Achieving the right balance of features, operator usability, and performance depends on the type of software you’re running, how it’s architected, and what platform it’s running on. While often less of a concern than these other factors, it’s still important to understand the performance profiles of these load balancers under different types of load. In this article, we will test five different popular load balancers: NGINX, HAProxy, Envoy, Traefik, and Amazon Application Load Balancer (ALB). We’ll analyze their performance, and give you the tools to understand them.